Extra-Credit Blog_Chi-ming Yang “Trial thing: Dogs, Porcelain and Chinese Export Art”

Yang’s lecture was very interesting and definitely related to topics we have covered this semester. She analyzed the role of dogs throughout history, especially in art. Dogs where a status symbol and where breed to achieve specific traits. This is very similar to our first discussions about the apple in The Botany of Desire. The apple was grafted to create a sweet apple for eating.

The dogs were importing and breed for desirable shapes and sizes, particularly the toy dog. It is very interesting how humans have manipulated nature for their own preferred aesthetics. The animals were more like object rather than individual beings with their own teleology. Dogs were painted in painting and sculptures where created so people could immortalize this symbol. It seems they are trying to prolong the life of the dog through breeding and through art.

In class we mostly focused on plants rather than animals, but most of the same concepts of dominating and changing plants applies to animals, particularly dogs. Dogs were domesticated for human’s pleasure, similarly to the grand garden of Versailles as a status symbol. The garden was created in a certain way to be the best garden, just like the goal of breeding of dogs. We still continue this process today. Maybe we need to be more accepting of nature and quit changing everything that does not please us. Nature does have its own goal and I’m starting to realize how we really don’t let that happen. Something as simple as dog breeding doesn’t phase me because it’s so common, but if we stop and think, this could be very wrong. Nature should be left to its own means. After all, nature can be very beautiful and we should accept this beauty.

P.S.: Fish can Feel Pain

They said it here. Does this mean that "catch and release" fishing practices are just sadistic?

Lining room vs family room

Most people have a living room that they use a couple times a year, where the family room is used all the time.  Wouldn’t it be more cost effective and sustainable to combine these rooms and create one slightly larger nicer room?  The homeowner would get more use out of it and would be able to enjoy a greater space.  The downsides are that you would have to clean when someone comes over, where you could just close the door to the family room.  The other downside is that when you go to sell your home you will have one less.  However, the home would cost less and might have a higher bang for your buck.  This seems like a great thing, but then why have people not already done this.  It goes back to older times when you brought over friends and family, with the goal to impress them by taking them to your nice sitting room and having a conversation.  This has never happened at my home, does it happen elsewhere, so why still the two rooms?  We are holding on to old customs, where today we are a more relaxed culture that could probably give up a living room.  This change is starting to slowly happen through modern open concept design, where the living room, kitchen, and dinning room are combined in one larger open space.  This also allows the home to feel larger and potentially more luxurious then it would with all the separate smaller rooms.

Owning Nature

I watched a part of a documentary called "the future of food" on hulu.com the other day and was amazed at what i heard. The Mansanto Company genetically engineered canola seed that was resistant to round-up. This would allow the seeds to be planted, sprayed with round-up, and have only the canola seed survive. This seed found its way into thousands of farmers fields as a result of wind and animal dispersal. A lot of seed present in farmers fields is believed to have fallen off trucks hauling large quantity of the seed. The Mansanto Company then went around collecting samples from farmers fields and threatened to sue any farmer that had canola plants that came from their seeds growing. Thousands of farmers paid the company to avoid lawsuits and destroyed their stockpiles of seed. The reason they were able to do this was because the company had patented the seed. This result was even held up in the court of law, with the judges saying it was the farmers responsibility to make sure the seed wasn't growing in their field. Personally I find this amazing and wrong. I feel it should be the company's responsible to contain their seed. If it is on the farmer the company could easily spread their seed simply for the purpose of suing the farmer. I don't see how the Mansanto Company can own a plant, it seems unethical. The dispersal of the seed can't be controlled or stopped. If this type of trend would continue nothing would be allowed to grow without copyright payments being made to a company every time a tree or plant reproduced. This whole idea seems unethical to me and another problem farmers shouldn't have to deal with.

Visualizing Animals

The abstracts presented on the theme of "Engaging with Animal Subjects: Ethical and Ecological Concerns" during the Finding Animals conference yesterday were very interesting to listen to. Cary Wolfe with his "Animals Before the Law" excerpt from what I understood is a book he is planning to finish this summer, made some highly stimulating points. He compared the mass murder of people during the holocaust to the way humans treat animals who are slated for food production. The big difference that can be seen here is that people need animals for food in order to survive. The holocaust was extremely immoral in that the Nazis did not need to exterminate people in order to survive. If the country was to all of a sudden become vegetarian, there would simply not be enough food supply to provide everyone with enough vegetarian food. One of the main requirements of a human diet is protein. Protein is needed to regenerate and repair human nerves tissues and bones. Yes, protein can be obtained through vegetarian foods such as grains, but it is not nearly enough. Proteins from grains are incomplete proteins. To receive a necessary amount of protein from vegetarian foods, several different vegetarian food sources need to be combined. So, eating animals for the obtainment of protein is the most efficient way of helping us survive. Finding the most efficient way to survive seems to be in the basic instinct of every creature. Valuing human life above all others is engraved in our DNA in order to help us remain alive as a species. Killing our own species on the other hand does not help humanity survive as a whole, but rather hinders survival while creating no benefit to anyone.

  The second talk by Gregg Mitman was also very significant. He explained how nature has recently come to be portrayed based on human feelings and emotions. He used the film "March of the Penguins" as an example, saying that Morgan Freeman's narration constantly attributes human characteristics to the penguins. He also explained how companies and corporations are changing the way nature films are made by solely focusing on what would be entertaining to the human mind so that they could make the most profit. He used the most popular video on YouTube from 2007 as an example. The video currently has 40,000,000 views. Battle at Kruger  portrays a very intense battle between different animal species. Click the link to watch for yourself. Greg reasoned that the video was so popular not because it was a nature video, but because it had all the necessary elements that entertain humans. With nature films becoming more and more about entertainment value, the real and important educational values of nature are lost in the process.

The third and last talk by Donna Haraway did not appeal to me as much. She seemed to convey a number of different points instead of focusing on a single subject. One of the main things she seemed to be advocating was the relationships between humans and animals that allow them to coexist together. She talked about the Churro sheep that were almost wiped out at one point. The commitment and dedication of different people in order to revive the species created a better way of life for both the people and the sheep. She also explains how Asian Water Buffalos are used for trophy shootings, as safari trophy animals. The buffalo becomes a sort of an icon and is constantly needed for both humans and for itself, since humans reproduce the animal, helping it to survive as a species. 

For those of you who didn't attend the finding animals conference, especially the segment "engaging with animal subjects: ethical and ecological considerations", you really missed out on some great stuff, although I'd have to agree with Hillary that portions of it went way over my head (especially the academic humor). And our exit wasn't the most graceful. What I found really interesting about this segment was that it affirmed something I've been thinking all semester-that our political philosophy has a pretty big influence on our environmental philosophy. The first speaker, Cary Wolfe, made a terrific comparison of our current factory farming practices to Nazi Germany and the holocaust. He reasoned that in the same way that totalitarian state promoted genocide was the ultimate conclusion of authoritarian and nationalistic trends of the 1800s, current factory farming practices are the ultimate conclusion of our attitudes of domination and exploitation of nature forwarded by the industrial revolution. He concluded that just as the ideology and logic of fascism was challenged and defeated, the logic and ideology behind our cruel treatment of animals will eventually be defeated as well. He also referenced peter singer's utilitarian views when talking about the Spanish parliaments passage of ape rights laws.

The second speaker, Gregg Mittman, discussed how animals are portrayed in the mass media. He talked about how conservatives attached their values of traditional marriage and child bearing to the documentary march of the penguins, and how animal sex was more heavily represented in the 90s on tv than the so called ' blue chip documentaries' This seems to suggest that the majority of us have an anthropomorphic view of animals and our relationship to them, and that we will continue to impart our political and social vaules onto the environment and nature. While it may be hard not to do so, this presentation, like our class, showed me that there are actually many different takes on environmental philosophy that don't invovle a purely human centered view. Mittman also discussed a project he was working on invovling a tribe in africa that lives among elephants and is in constant battle with them for survival on a changing terrain. I believe that this scenario functions as a sort of microcausum of the battle between human society and all of nature. The solution that the scientists seemed to be trying to implement was a combination of techinques like advanced tracking and studying the elphants combined with things like bees nests on wire to protect crops from elephant. Instead of trying to separate the people and the elephants, or the people killing all of the elephants, the scientists wanted to find ways for them to live together in the same place in relative harmony, where both people's and elephants interests are considered. I think that the mentality this solution adopts will be necessary to solve our current environmental crises.

Animals Before the Law

I also attended the Finding Animals panel yesterday afternoon. I felt so sophisticated hanging out with all of the cool trendy people who attended, even though I didn't get some of the inside jokes everybody else laughed at.

I'd like to unpack a little bit of the first paper by speaker Cary Wolfe. The paper is Animals Before the Law, about which the Chair of the program, Sushmita Chatterjee called "absolutely timeless." I think she referred to it with those words because of the connection Cary made to an issue of old to today.

Cary used the term "biopolitics" often in his paper. I understood that term to mean the political influence and regulation of certain biotechnologies. He compared modern-day slaughterhouses to the function of Nazi concentration camps. He talked about the genocide of the holocaust, and how we can't compare slaughterhouses to genocide because they are different by definition. Genocide is the attempt to remove an entire group/species completely, which was attempted by the Nazis during the holocaust. However, Cary thinks the slaughterhouses today are worse than the holocaust, because entire populations of a certain animal are not attempted to be eradicated; it's only some at a time, and there is no end in sight for this problem.

Another interesting fact Cary mentioned is that Henry Ford got the idea for the assembly line from a Chicago slaughterhouse. Here is an example of biopolitics, as factory farming becomes political when essentially the birth of modern cars occurs as influence of such farming practices, if you can even call it that. This proposed the question, are we going in full circle here? First, the holocaust is a mass-murder of millions of people. Next, slaughterhouses become efficient and are able to mass-murder millions of animals. Then, the assembly line technique is adopted from the previously stated slaughterhouses, and produces the birth of the American automobile. Genocide still occurs in the world, like in Rwanda, Darfur and the Bosnian Genocide in the mid-90's. So when I say full circle, I mean unfortunately mass-killing is still taking place, and is being influenced in different ways by the new technologies made available. Cary feels so strongly against mass-murder of animals in slaughterhouses that he compares them to the holocaust and genocide. Painting such a vivid picture was definitely effective, and caused me to think of factory farming in a different and more serious way.

Finding Animals

Again first off, I have to agree with Hilary that I did not have any idea that the program was going to end when it did. If only we had waited even 2 more minutes.

I really enjoyed attending this and I feel I got a lot out of it much of what all three speakers discussed. The first speaker, Cary Wolfe, was really interesting when he talked about animal rights. Should we treat animals as property or as persons. I never realized before what a huge debate this was and how critical it can be in many aspects of life. Comparing race and the Holocaust to the treatment of animals was a really intriguing way of describing the whole thing. I thought it was really neat when he talked about viruses and whether or not they should be treated as living creatures even if it goes against human life, just as we had discussed in class on Thursday. It is definitely a topic that I want to discuss more with people and think about. Especially with the Swine Flu (H1N1?) happening now right all around us.
The second speaker, Gregg Mitman, I found to be speak of the topics that interest me the most. When he was discussing the crazy animal sex that floods our televisions, I never thought about how that it is kind of weird that our society loves it. I think we will continue to see more and more films on wildlife and nature. He talked about how not much is given back to the areas and animals filmed in the process. There is no mention of animals on the credits and these movies are making millions of dollars. The third speaker, Donna Haraway, also had some really good points in her speech. I liked how she told of living things taking care of country. She also brought the animals belongingness into question. Do we allow animals to be a part of our lives. Finally, I never knew that bees could be used to keep elephants away from crops. I really like the idea of finding alliances with nature to help better ourselves. I feel this method goes against nature and the animals the least. Overall, I am really glad I went to this tonight, it opened my eyes to a lot of ideas I never thought about before.

Animal Subjects: Ethical and Ecological Concerns

First, I must admit that although this panel was a bit longer than I expected; Kayla, John, and I only had to wait five minutes more without looking like jerks for leaving. Ah - how unfortunate.

Second, I must admit that while parts of "Engaging with Animal Subjects: Ethical and Ecological Concerns" was over my head, I found the majority of this subject quite interesting. It began with Cary Wolfe discussing Animals about the Law. A point I thought was particularly interesting of his was the idea of holocaust and Nazism getting their ideas from animal slaughter houses. I found it extremely interesting to think of genocide this way, though it is extremely true. The genocides are simply another tangent of racism, in which races of humans animalize other humans, treating them to efficient mass extinctions, much like in the meat production industries. Humans generally find genocide to be quite wrong and so therefore I wondered why more humans do not find the mass extinction of animals wrong. Then Wolfe discussed Esposito's viewpoint in which genocide is one species killing their own, so therefore the killing of animals by humans can't very well be considered genocide. I found this interesting and I had to agree with his later points that we miss the individuality of all life. I think there is great ambiguity in laws because if we were had to create all life equally and ethically- then we would have to treat ecoli the same that we treat the great ape. I thought this point in particular especially pertained to what we had been discussing in class, not only recently, but also with the lobster debate. At what point does some forms of life become valuable or invaluable?

There was a point in Donna Haraway's presentation which I thought might bring a general closure to our class. She discussed the differences between "Wild Country" and "Quiet Country". Wild being that which doesn't bear the mark of the care of generations and Quiet Country being that which does bear the mark of the care of generations. She seems to believe that all humans should try to leave behind us "Quiet Country" and that the main concern is the extinctions or exterminations of animals which challenges us as humans to stay with the trouble and to get better at leaving behind this "Quiet Country". I think we can relate this idea to our ethical concerns about today's environmental crisis, and that the goal of each individual should be to try and leave behind us "Quiet Country"

Finding Animals Conference

Earlier today, I attended the third annual Finding Animals Conference in Foster Auditorium. The purpose of this conference was to explore comparative and historical perspectives on the field of Animals studies. Although the conference over the course of two days, I was only able to attend one session. This session was called Redrawing Borders: New Models of Animal Consciousness and Behavior. During this part, three guest speakers gave very informative presentations on the developing theories, research, and work in this area.

Dr. Richard Doyle, who is currently a Penn State Professor, was one of these guest speakers. His talk, Finding Animals with Plants: Sustainable Attention Attractors and Noöspheric Intelligence, centered on the influence of Plants globally and their importance in sustaining life. One concept that he touched upon was the perception of Plants where intelligence is concerned. He discussed how Plants are not viewed as intelligent, and are also described in the things they lack.

I agreed with Dr. Doyle here. Since we generally tend to evaluate one’s intelligence based upon its vivid capabilities, it is not hard to understand why a plant would be viewed this way. There is no way for a plant to show its skill at mastering new material, or performing tricks that people would assume they are incapable of doing. Plants are simply not equipped with brains, multiple functioning parts, and similar capabilities to do this. Because it appears that anything is possible, I am not eager to conclude that plants lack intelligence. I just think that determining the factors that would make one plant more intelligent than the next may be harder to discern.

Dogs

So I could only make it to the presentation for a little bit, but I heard an interesting speech on dogs. I missed the introduction, but from what I understand he was speaking dogs and how they have been changed and affected by humans. Interestingly, he opens with an anecdote about Kujo. His major point was on how Jamaicans and the British were warring with each other. He then explains how they trained bloodhounds from birth to actively seek black people. The process began when they were born, they were kept in a kennel for most of their life. They were then fed small amounts of blood and meat from various animals. The owners then built a black man out of wicker, and filled the inside with meat and blood. They then brought it slowly closer to the kennel were the starving dogs could only stare at it. Finally they were let loose. Once this happened, they just swarmed the wicker figure and tore it to pieces to get to the meat. This whole process was designed to make the dogs want to eat and kill the black people living on this island. It has been said that this was the key to winning the war. It was hard to understand what the speaker was saying, he was rambling a lot. But I think his point was on how people can alter nature for its benefit. I was more curious with if by training these animals to want to eat black people, are there any long lasting effects. There’s a stereotypical joke, that dogs hate black people and other dark people. Perhaps there’s a hint a truth to these jokes.

Selling vs. Donating Blood

I was talking to a few people the other day and the topic of selling blood and plasma came up (don’t ask me how). Immediately I commented how it would be pretty sweet to sell blood; it’s an easy 30 dollars that’s for sure. The one person then added how he sold his plasma a few weeks ago to help pay for his rent or something. As we continued discussing this fairly easy process for making some quick cash on the side, I found myself debating whether I would be able to do this or not. Sure it’s great to get some money, especially for someone as lazy as me, but then again I could be donating the blood for free instead. All of us were questioning the morality of this act of selling blood. When given the option of donating blood and doing something truly good for society, selling blood seems cheap, almost as if I would be selling a part of me. I then thought about how there has been an increase in women donating eggs. The increase in egg donors many believe is due to the poor economy and need of some extra money. They say it’s donating, but women earn often times up to $7,000 or more for one donation. Some women donate several times to help support themselves and their families. Many people view it as a win-win situation; they are helping out infertile women and benefiting from it as well. Others believe it’s immoral, almost as if these donors are baby factories.
Is this just an example of how no act is selfless, no matter how good it is? Or is it this a combination of achieving a goal for the greater good as well as for the individual?